Review of: A Dangerous Personality

Helena Blavatsky gained notoriety in the latter part of the 19th century for clairvoyance, chanelling spirits who helped her write her books, and establishing the Theosophical Society, an organization that believed in uniting the inner truths of all religions with the metaphysical sciences. A world traveler with a dicey background, she received the heralded attentions of Thomas Edison and several members of royal families. The Russian born and raised Blavatsky became a citizen of the United States and lived in New York City for a time hooking up with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a journalist and agricultural expert, who helped found the Society and travelled with her to India to investigate Hinduism and Buddhism. As witnessed by a number of people, she materialized ‘astral telegrams’ from thin air that often had significant messages for the addressees. Her life was full of intense dramas and contradictions including the death of her 5-year old deformed son (who despite her love of him insisted that she was not his mother), and being one of few survivors in a catastrophic boat explosion that supposedly killed her husband.

Why then is The Perry Street Theatre Company’s production of Sallie Bingham’s play about Blavatsky so unabashedly lifeless? The bio-play is always a challenge for any writer. What should one leave in or out, how to find a dramatic trajectory that can encompass several years, and why tell a person’s story on the stage to begin with are questions that need to be answered if you want to keep your audience engaged. Trying to cram in a lot of information, Ms. Bingham unfortunately languishes in lakes of exposition cobbling together scenes of stilted dialogue while establishing a plot that goes relatively nowhere. For someone labeled A Dangerous Personality, Madame Blavatsky, or HPB as she preferred to be called, comes off as merely a troubled woman whose good intentions helped her to believe in her own concoctions. Who doesn’t know someone with this kind of psychology? How fascinating an exploration of this facet of the story could be. But Ms. Bingham, I feel, wants us to take HPB at face value and that the subsequent denunciations of her by religious and scientific circles alike were cruel and unfounded.

Everyone involved with the production has solid professional credits but simply end up at sea when trying to get this leaden boat to float. Director Martin Platt seems to have thrown up his hands, staging the work clumsily on Bill Clarke’s cheap looking sets. The lighting of Tom Sturge is quite less than subtle and while Martha Hally’s costumes succeed in some places they go woefully astray in others. The actors have all done much better work elsewhere. How could they not?

The brief history of HPB in the program (taken from the internet) intrigued me enough to google her. It is no wonder why the playwright was overwhelmed. When I attend my next séance I’m going to attempt contact with Madame Blavatsky and ask her why she didn’t send a few ‘astral telegrams’ to Ms. Bingham.

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